Richard “Ritchie” Nelson was born in Norway in 1899, the son of his adoptive mother’s sister and a Swedish Jew. He was raised alongside his three cousins and at age ten, he persuaded his parents to immigrate to Canada’s west coast to join two already established older brothers. By age thirteen, Ritchie was crafting gillnets from discards and fishing the Fraser River for salmon. Quickly mastering English and with money earned from fishing, he paid for a year of education at a Lutheran college. In 1929, he co-founded Nelson Bros. Fisheries with his brother Norman. The fishery operated from the west coast of Vancouver Island to Alaska.

With endless energy and boundless bravado, Ritchie grew Nelson Bros. into a highly successful enterprise complete with a huge fleet of gillnetters, packers, reduction plants and canneries. Nelson Bros. processed millions of pounds of salmon, herring, halibut, and crab in a year. In an industry that by the 1930s was conservative and corporate, Ritchie stayed extremely close to “his” fishermen and shore workers, working tirelessly for them—a stance that earned him their loyalty, admiration, and devotion. A champion of all fishermen and cannery workers, Ritchie Nelson was honoured by the Tlingit First Nation as “Big Fin,” which is an allusion to the killer whale or “the one that tells everybody else what to do.” In this unique story of grit, ambition, and kindness, Macdonald delves into the history of one of BC’s most successful fishing enterprises that is today thriving as a business consultancy in the seafood industry.